RoughIdea app for iPhone and iPad

Outlines and mind maps are great, but what do they mean? Why are they better than blocks of text?

Creating mind-maps and outlines should be really useful, but often theyre a dead-end. Dont get me wrong, theyre fun, and they feel as if they should be useful. Somehow theyre not. Ive a library of them, and I wondered why I never referred to them, and then I realised.

I was reading a number of books, articles and websites, and replacing a disorganised collection of written words with a jumble of words in bubbles. Worse, it would take another editing session to pull out the useful information, because it was scattered across a large diagram. Frustrating.

So I created RoughIdea.

RoughIdea doesnt stop you creating large diagrams with information scattered across them, but it does make it practical to make sense of it all. Its simple. I borrowed a technique from research, where you tag (or code) pieces of information. You can use this in a number of ways.

You can come up with a theory before you review the information, and make statements that support or refute your theory. Create a tag for each, and then tag the outline as you build it.

Another way is create tags as you go along for review afterwards.. Of course RoughIdea lets you do both.

How do you extract the information? You create summary nodes that pull out any nodes that match a tag or a group of tags. RoughIdea then does the searching for you. The number of occurrences of a tag or the sum of their values can be discovered too. Yes, RoughIdea tags have values, and you can do sums with them.

* How many times does a text refer to international trade? Or a particular person? Of anything else you want to count. Its easy with RoughIdea.
* How much will my holiday or project cost me? You can tag with the cost of individual values, and then RoughIdea will add it up.

But when you tell your partner or boss (both?) about something youve discovered with RoughIdea, how do they know youre right? Convert documents and websites into PDFs, load them into RoughIdea, and then RoughIdea will store where you found it all out.

RoughIdea comes complete with the following templates:
* a user guide for the app
* a to-do template
* a project template
* a trip planner
* a document review template.

Once youve tagged and summarised your outline, you can output it a beautiful PDF which includes photos and snapshots of source documents. You can share an OPML file of your outlines with other users, or save them so that you re-use your outlines as templates.

By the way: I hate task switching on iOS, so you can switch between outline and document with the tap of a button on the menu bar.

Along with this, you can easily add SWOT and PEST diagrams, tables, calendars, and lots of other handy things. The user guide tells all.

I use this everyday, and I hope that you will too.